What Lies Ahead for the Chicago Bulls?

With every major free agent expected to be targeted for a max contract now done playing basketball for the season, media outlets have free range to let their wildest dreams come true thanks to the power of the pen (or the keyboard).

Every big star is going to be rumored to be going many different places, and one place that will be in the mix with every star no matter the position is going to be the Chicago Bulls.

Right now, however, I will try to keep my crazy thoughts in check and come up with some more realistic predictions on which big names will be wearing a Bulls uniform next season.

So lets go through some of the big names in free agency and what the chances are that they are going to end up in the Windy City.

Dwyane Wade

Throughout the season, Wade was considered the one most likely to end up in Chicago, and there are plenty of reasons why it would be a great career choice for him.

First, he was born and raised in Chicago.

Playing for your home team is every little kid's dream, who doesn't pretend they are playing in the NBA Championships, Game Seven, 0:05 on the clock, you have the ball and you are on the home team, you count down 5...4...3...2...1, then you shoot and make the buzzer sound and hope you make the basket.

Wade would have the rare opportunity to make that backyard fantasy a reality, and Bulls fans wouldn't be very disappointed if he did.

There are skeptics who say that Rose and Wade wouldn't work well together because they both need to have the ball in their hands to score, but those people are missing the issue that neither player has a complimentary scorer to take the pressure off.

Having giving these guys somebody to work off of could take each player to new heights that they couldn't reach on their own.

All in all, I think that he has a good chance of ending up in a Bulls uniform, but those chances go down big time if a certain other big name ends up in town.

LeBron James

All the talk after the infamous Game Five was whether or not James had played his last game in Cleveland. That talk has now intensified big time after Cavs were bounced out of the playoffs by the aging Celtics earlier tonight.

Put a gun to GM Gar Forman's head and tell him to pick a player and he will throw Wade into the trash for the opportunity to have the guy who could dethrone Michael Jordan as the best basketball player of all-time on his team.

As I watch ESPN right now, analyst after analyst is picking Chicago to be the team that LeBron will be playing for next season (going against every Celtics fan who chanted "New York Knicks" during the game).

Too bad analysts have trouble making the right prediction.

The people who have a better chance of making a good prediction, however, are GMs around the league. According to the TrueHoops blog at ESPN.com, multiple GMs are saying Chicago is the destination for BronBron.

One GM even says the Bulls will have Calipari, LeBron, and either Wade or Bosh next season. This fantasy goes past even my wildest dreams, but it sure would be great. Just for the fun of it, lets take a look at the lineup next season if they were to get Wade too.

Bosh is a player that will give the Bulls the one thing that they have been missing for a decade, an inside scoring presence.

Having Bosh and Noah working together in the paint will change the Bulls from being an average team in the middle to one of the best in the NBA.

Having somebody inside to dump it off to will be big for Rose as well, helping him get some of the pressure off of him to do all of the scoring.

If the Bulls are to get Bosh, however, they would need to go out to find a shooter as well, possibly somebody like Joe Johnson or another pure scorer like Wade, and unlike the other two players above, Bosh doesn't make the Bulls a championship team by himself.

That being said, Bosh will make the Bulls a legitimate team in the Eastern Conference and one that every team should fear.

Joe Johnson

Johnson, like Bosh, doesn't immediately make the Bulls a favorite in the East, but pair him with Bosh or James and the Bulls are a nearly unbeatable team.

Johnson will have plenty of offers to go elsewhere, but if the Bulls don't sign Wade, they would be foolish not to try to sign this guy to play next to Derrick Rose.

Since the loss of Ben Gordon, the Bulls haven't had a legit shooting guard, and having one will take a lot of pressure off of Rose and let him open up the floor a lot more.

The Bulls are in an outstanding position this offseason. They have a lot of money available and a solid young nucleus that is ready to attract any big name free agent they want.

They are probably the biggest hyped team for the upcoming season without having a head coach or any free agent signed, and the hype will mean nothing if they don't come through with at least one of these guys.

If they can ink two of these guys, they will be expected to win championship after championship for the next decade or so.

There is another possibility, though, and that is that all of these free agents will go the way that Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol did in the past, and that is not ending up on the team after a deal was supposedly all but done.